


Harold Spark

by cailures



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-22
Updated: 2015-08-22
Packaged: 2018-04-16 16:28:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4632141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cailures/pseuds/cailures
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Howard likes imagining Peggy saving him from mortal peril. He isn't subtle about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Harold Spark

**Author's Note:**

> For #10

They’re relaxing in the sitting room Howard Stark’s obnoxiously expensive apartment when Angie brings it up. 

“Hey, English?”

“Mmm?” Peggy looks up from her notebook. 

“You know that Captain America radio program?”

“You listen to that trash?”

“It’s fun!” Angie says defensively, “Stop being such a sourpuss. Anyway, it’s always on at work; it’s not like I can help hearing it. But I think you might like it a little better now. They’ve put in a new character.” 

“Really.”

“His name’s Harold Spark. He’s some kind of eccentric millionaire inventor or something, but get this – Betty Carver has to rescue him.”

Peggy looks at her skeptically. “You’re kidding.”

“I know! She’s so useless normally, but she disguises herself and sneaks into some kind of party for the German officers…”

Peggy listens to the entire dramatic tale of Betty Carver using her hairpin to pick the lock on Harold Spark’s handcuffs, promises to listen to the next episode to find out how they escape from the prison, and spends most of the next few days learning more about the business side of American radio stations than she’d ever found it necessary to know. 

**

When the real Howard winds up getting himself really kidnapped three weeks later, the only reason she doesn’t suspect it as part of some elaborate role-playing game is that when she finally tracks him down, he’s being held in a stiflingly airless but perfectly clean unused office at the back of a building, rather than a dramatically filthy sub-basement or some gleaming technological wonder-prison full of stainless steel and unidentifiable sharp objects. 

At least it’s relatively easy to sneak into once she finds herself a maid’s uniform, and she does have to give the kidnappers points for convenience. And also for intelligence: their handcuffs are extremely hard to remove even when she does check to make sure Howard is watching the door before surreptitiously pulling a bobby pin out of her hair and trying that. 

Something thumps in the hallway outside, and she hears two voices moving towards them, getting louder and louder…and then passing the door and moving on down the hallway. 

Stark breathes out a sigh of relief, and Peggy abandons the handcuffs and heads for the window. 

“Hey, where are you – ”

“I’m sorry, I must have forgotten to bring the right hairpins today. New plan.”

“Hairpins?” His voice is much too innocent, and Peggy rolls her eyes before pushing open the window and glancing up and down. They’re on the seventh floor, in the back of the building facing out onto a narrow alley – there’s a guard at the bottom, but the wall is a sheer face with only the slightest of window ledges; he probably won’t be looking up because it’s so improbable that any idiot would try to come down it. Halfway down the alley from him, Jarvis is waiting in a delivery truck full of cabbages, no doubt wondering where they are.

The original plan had been climbing down with the rope hidden under her uniform skirt, but with Howard still handcuffed, that strategy has suddenly gone from risky to utterly insane. She could lower him down in a kind of harness, but then he’d be down in the alley defenseless until she got herself to the bottom. And he certainly can’t hold a rope himself like this. 

Peggy chews her lip, looking for any alternative. The fire escape is about five meters horizontally from the window, and there’s another window opening out onto that – when she’d passed by, that door had looked as featureless as any of the other doors in the building, bearing the nameplate of Joseph Lester, Patent Attorney.

Well, hopefully Joseph Lester takes Saturdays off. “Come on,” she ways, pulling Howard by the arm towards the door. “We’re going down the hallway to the right, through the third door down, and directly out the window. Let me deal with any guards; you just run.”

Howard nods, and they burst through the door and down the empty hallway – there’s almost nobody there, until the janitor down the end drops his mop and pulls a machine gun out of his cart, and Peggy yanks Howard down to the ground, rolling on top of him while the bullets whiz over their heads. She grabs vase of artificial flowers from a side-table and hurls it down the hall at the man, and when he ducks to avoid the crash of porcelain, she sprints the rest of the way and throws herself bodily at the bottom of his cart, pushing it forward into his body.

He sprawls on the ground, bleeding from the nose: he must have knocked his head. Peggy grabs a heavy-duty, long-handled wrench from the cart, and turns around to find Howard staring. 

“Come on, Harold, we don’t have all day,” she says pointedly, half-quoting Betty Carver from the radio show. Howard quails a little, but fortunately the wrench makes quick work of Joseph Lester’s door, and the office is populated only by endless stacks of papers. Apparently he really is a patent attorney. 

“Down the fire escape, go.” She pushes him out, and they clatter down; they’re making an inordinate amount of noise, but the guard below doesn’t even look up until they’re already at the second floor, and Peggy simply throws the wrench directly at his head. 

He ducks, and pops back up again, but Jarvis is faster, swerving directly under the fire escape platform so they can jump off into the pile of cabbages in the back of his truck.

Twenty minutes out, they leave the cabbages behind and head for their second vehicle, this time a soda truck. Peggy slides into the cab, brushing cabbage out of her hair, but even in the relief of getting him out alive, she’s not about to let Howard Stark off the hook. 

“Rescuing you from Nazis? Really, Howard?”

Stark gives her a wounded look. “Hey, is it my fault they make me into an idiot on that stupid show? Look what they did to you!”

“It is when it only started happening after you bought the radio station,” Peggy says flatly, and pins him with a glare. 

Howard coughs. “Look, let’s just get out of here first, okay?”

Jarvis clears his throat, and Peggy can’t be exactly sure, but she thinks she spots a smirk.


End file.
